Posts

Incredibly moving and such a fantastic sentiment. Bonne dimanche.

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."

Amazing time lapse of someone’s trip from Denver to Singapore via Chicago and Tokyo, all compressed down to 5 minutes. Incredible little piece of work.

Um, I’ve done more than a few of these things with ActiveRecord in a Rails app. You probably have too. From the fine folks at the Engine Yard.

That’s Not a Memory Leak, It’s Bloat

OK, very geeky, but believe it or not, I almost once went down this path and was supposed to be at university originally studying astrophysics and the nature of reality. Still not sure what happened. Ok, well there was that blonde girl that distracted me, but…

Love this summary of seven questions that keep physicists up at night .

This is a fantastic ad out of Ireland: What if you had to ask everyone in a country whether you could marry someone ?

BTW, watching this ad makes me very proud to be Canadian (even if I’m down here in Oz), since gay marriage is legal in the True North Strong and Free.

One of the more exciting things about the new gig is the full-on focus on campaigning. This video was shot in one day… yep, one day with the bulk of the post-production work done that same day by the amazing guys who we shot it with. Absolutely great experience and learned loads.

Want to help get this ad seen and create a sustainable future for Australia? Please donate to get this aired in the same marginal seats the coal lobby is targeting.

The always astute Joel Spolsky talking about the book Coders at Work. Zeroes in on a interview with Joel Zawinski and the avoidance of technical fancy-pantsedness. Love this quote from Zawinski when asked about his pet peeve for over-engineering:

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.’

Shipping is a feature. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing.

If you’re upgrading to Snow Leopard this week, and a rubyist, you’ll need to sort out your dev environment again and the awesome HiveLogic has provided some great updated instructions (though I can’t tell if this works with 64bit MySQL as I know that was a gotcha for me last time I upgraded).

Happy upgrading my geeky friends ! I will be doing the same as soon as I get to Oz (or slightly sooner if stuck in Honkers longer).

OK, a bit dry, but a very interesting presentation (from a super geeky perspective) on using the open source package R and some nice libraries for doing social network analysis of data sets.

Can definitely see how I can use this for community segmentation in an interesting way.

Doing a bit of work on community actor identification for the new gig (or at least looking at how we can get some tools together to automate analysis).

Very handy little snippet from aaron longwell’s blog. I always have this happen to me on personal projects when I do something and then don’t get back to it from real work till a few weeks later.

git co development # The destination branch
git diff HEAD...topic-branch"</p>

the magic there is the … In English, that symbol means show the difference between the common ancestor commit and HEAD…. in other words, only show what changes in the topic branch while it was distinct from the branch it’s being merged into.